Keeping radio alive… in the museum

by John Dowd

Radio in the Bitterroot Valley has a lot of nostalgia tied to it. Not only was there a strong community tied to the live broadcasts, but it was one of the main ways news got to people. For retired “Voice of the Valley,” Steve Fullerton, radio has been his life.

Fullerton started as an intern at KLYQ in 1969, and began a career with the station in 1975. After retiring from the station last year, he decided to take on a project he has been looking at for some time. 

Fullerton has collected many of the old recorded broadcasts from the years, and has access to the recordings in the station’s storage. He wants to save these old recordings for future generations.

“I want to make sure these tapes are saved for history’s sake,” said Fullerton. “A lot of them could have been destroyed.”

Fullerton has partnered with the Ravalli County Museum to digitize the recordings. He is making several extra electronic copies, to avoid losing them. His hope is that they will be stored in the museum, and somehow, people will be able to access them.

Fullerton is roughly working from oldest to newest, from the late 60’s to the 90’s. As he moves through, he is finding a lot of history nuggets hidden within the audio. 

According to Fullerton, KLYQ started in 1961, and fortunately, early on they started taping a lot of their broadcasts. This had a lot to do with the fact that KLYQ broadcasted only during the day to avoid interfering with other radio broadcasts. Since they were a day-time station, they had to pre-record high school games and then broadcast them the next day. Because a system was already in place to record, it became easy for shows to be recorded live, and so many were. 

Traditionally, announcers and broadcasters, when they retired, could leave with their recorded shows as mementos. However, many did not, or forgot about them. After years of collecting dust, many of these tapes have hung around the station, and Fullerton, who has a deep love for these historic recordings, has collected them from the station. Some of the oldest date back to the 1960’s, and Fullerton has begun viewing several new broadcasts portraying important events in the valley, and some with relevance to the nation as a whole. 

“I’ve always been interested in old radio, so it was a natural outgrowth of what I like to do,” said Fullerton. After retiring from the station, he took a chance approaching the Ravalli County Museum. Luckily for Fullerton, the museum was excited about the prospect, and they agreed to give him space in the basement to work on the recordings. Fullerton comes in a couple times a week to listen and record. 

He has discovered that the quality of the tape deck has a lot to do with the playbacks, and so it was imperative to find the best one he could. This helped improve the sound quality. Those tapes will break down over time, and have a higher chance of breaking when being played back. Every time one of them is played, there is a chance some of the recording could be lost. Time is short due to the possibility of deterioration, but once played, the recording is run through a high quality sound processor and a computer to maximize the overall quality and to save it on the computer and external storage devices. 

Part of the fun and the challenge of the project, according to Fullerton, is the variety of mediums there are, and how it is always a challenge tracking down players for those mediums. He says it’s great that people try to keep recordings of memories, but it’s also important to try to hold onto the technology to play those recordings back. Technology is always changing, and from cassettes to reels, minis-discs to flash drives, it has been a true effort finding ways to even access these recordings. And what he finds is often a surprise. 

“That’s the part I like most about it, there it is!” said Fullerton when he spoke about the history played back through the tapes. He said it was also like being in the room again at that time, and hearing those events unfold as they were happening. He has heard recordings covering the fires of 2000, listening to interviews and live broadcasts. He listened to recordings of the last passenger train through the valley, in an organized event with Montana Rail Link called the “Santa Express.” Fullerton found pieces from his old mentor, George Solander, who was the original “Voice of the Valley.” 

Fullerton discovered a recording of his interview with Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2002 speaking on the Rocky Mountain Lab. In that interview, they discussed funding for the lab, which was in question at the time. He found a recording where the station interviewed Dr. Willy Burgdorfer talking about his discovery of Lyme Disease in the 1980’s. He said there was a “fantasy parade” that the station hosted, where companies bought “floats,” which were larger-than-life ridiculous and impossible parade floats the station made up. In reality, the parade never actually happened but it was broadcast live as if it was. They included crowd sound effects and had fun as if they were there watching these insane things happen. 

He even found old recordings of an old-time radio show he wrote called “Cavalcade of Stars.” He said, “I can listen to that over and over again.” The show was written in 1997, and featured the investigator Dick Darkness. The show was written in the style of original radio broadcasts that pre-dated television. It featured three parts, with music in between. The show had sound effects, various actors and took the better part of two hours. “It just takes me right back,” said Fullerton.

For Fullerton, it really is a passion project. Many of the recordings he has found have been of him and people he has worked with over the years. The events they covered and captured in these recordings often bring excitement, and he will say, “Oh yeah, I was there!” He hopes some people who can eventually listen to them will feel the same. 

In total, he has hundreds and hundreds of hours of recordings to go through. He started in early March this year, and has made his way through only a sliver of what lies before him. 

Eventually, he and the museum will try to get the recordings onto the museum’s system, sorted and indexed, allowing them to be searched and viewed by content. This will all be a monumental task. He estimates the project will be ongoing, and some of the first recordings may be available next year at the earliest, but it may be longer. The museum will also need to decide how to display them to the public, and what things they may want to hear. Right now, it is all about building a repository of the recordings, and getting them converted to digital so they wont expire. 

Another part of Fullerton’s project has been the rediscovery of true community. In the days of radio, when broadcast was a primary medium for the valley, without many other options, the community really came together over events. For Fullerton, it really has been a journey back through the years, with voice as a guide. A worthy project for an old broadcaster.